THE outcry against the “reframed” General Education component of college or university-level studies proposed by a technical panel constituted under Prospero de Vera’s chairmanship of the Commission on Higher Education was actually a philosophical debate about what university education ought to be — and it is a discussion we needed to have, one that must continue and, with determined effort, remain rational.
Sometimes, a concept, a label, a slogan, a byword becomes popular and then makes its way into almost every conversation. One of these is “The Fifth Industrial Revolution.” This refers to human interaction, affairs and planning tucking in and harnessing the tremendous power of artificial intelligence and complex forms of digital and information technology.
In the United States, some commencement speakers who championed AI or even merely heralded it as the “new revolution” were booed and heckled — prompting some of them to appeal to a clearly restive audience for the opportunity to make their point. The resistance is not completely unexpected, nor is it unwelcome. It is a salutary caution to educational planners who would have education — particularly higher and advanced education — rush headlong into the alluring novelty that is AI harnessed by business, industry, the economy as a whole and even government programs. It is, of course, about the loss of jobs as automation and its latest mutations take over what once were tasks accomplished by persons of flesh and blood, imagination and vision, soul and spirit. The Church’s document on artificial intelligence, “Antiqua et Nova” (The Old and the New), released jointly by two Dicasteries, captures the unease about a civilization veering towards AI-dependence.
“Consequently, although AI can simulate aspects of human reasoning and perform specific tasks with incredible speed and efficiency, its computational abilities represent only a fraction of the broader capacities of the human mind. For instance, AI cannot currently replicate moral discernment or the ability to establish authentic relationships. Moreover, human intelligence is situated within a personally lived history of intellectual and moral formation that fundamentally shapes the individual’s perspective, encompassing the physical, emotional, social, moral and spiritual dimensions of life. Since AI cannot offer this fullness of understanding, approaches that rely solely on this technology or treat it as the primary means of interpreting the world can lead to ‘a loss of appreciation for the whole, for the relationships between things, and for the broader horizon.’”
Unless coupled with a sound appreciation of what it means to be human and kept within ethical confines, AI and “Fifth Industrial Revolution” may just be the siren song luring us to yet another catastrophe in educational planning and organization.
The demands of the workplace are increasingly myriad and specialized — and if universities aim at equipping students with the competencies demanded by each specialized assignment, our higher education institutions will never be able to catch up; new technologies, new systems, new work processes — changes happen overnight. The fact is that people learn on the job. The awesome capacity of the human person to adapt, to develop skills necessary to gain mastery over a challenge, to innovate — all these allow persons, whether in the higher levels of policy formulation and planning or the middle and lower levels that are more performative and implementing, to be good at what they are doing while doing what they do.
What college and university education should do is to lead students to a vision of the world, the wondrous history of humankind and of our nation, an understanding of the immense capacities of human intelligence, the dynamics of human relations, the deliberate cultivation of a critical sense and, of extreme importance, working familiarity with the difficult but necessary concepts of “good” and “just.” National boundaries are, in our day and time, hardly anything more than “convenient fictions” for certain legal purposes, but the immense mobility of human persons for whom “home” can be anywhere in the world besides the country of one’s birth means that higher education must introduce the student to the wider world — and this will mean sensitivity to geopolitical and historical factors and cultural sensitivities. And because no matter how potent automation and digitalization may be, they must always safeguard our humanity; the university student must be led by competent professors to an understanding of what it is to be human, and this will include the crucial difference between right and wrong, an important divide that tends to be effaced when “effective-ineffective,” “efficient-inefficient,” “useful-useless” become the paramount disjunctions!
In fact, there are brazen advertisements of AI tools for clearly unethical purposes. One commonly advertised application is capable of making an AI-generated essay, term paper or even thesis “appear” as though it had been humanly written. This is an application calculated to deceive, devised to enable a student to pass off an AI output as his or her own. There is no contesting the fact that AI considerably speeds up and makes more comprehensive the search for data — and even here, it will only be dependent on what is available and within its reach, in keeping with the fundamental axiom of all computer technology: garbage in, garbage out! But what to do about the data and what conclusions to draw from them will always be left to human intelligence.
I must insist on the point that higher education in a free society must allow the student to choose between competing, complementing philosophies of higher education — articulated by a university’s mission, vision and objectives and articulated in its curricula formulated in the full enjoyment of the academic freedom that is constitutionally guaranteed. And while the State’s regulatory mechanism protects the public against profiteers who don the habiliments of educators, it is not desirable for regulatory bodies to be paternalistic — to work on the assumption that leaders of higher education institutions and the students who enroll in them are incapable of sound and mature decisions — and still less instruments of control, for this is clearly proscribed by the Constitution and the jurisprudence that has grown around this guarantee of the Constitution!
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
